IF YOU WISH TO SEE the Romanian town of Babadag, get in your hot air balloon, with a nice cup of coffee. Glide past the convenience store on the corner of Venice and Sepulveda, which isn’t too far from where I am writing this now, and over the toothy mountains and frothy seas you know from postcards. Eventually, you’ll find yourself in Europe. Avoid the flashy capitals. Europe can be overwhelming, so think of it as East and West — there is nothing wrong with following in the footsteps of finicky, divisive political history. Heading east through Germany, pay attention to how the neatly ordered villas give way to Soviet-style apartment towers. Once you cross into Poland, you’ll see how the race toward modernization and beautification (the Poles tucking in their shirts for a seat at the big boys’ table of Europe) has gone into overdrive; don’t ask questions when locals remind you that you’re in Central — not Eastern — Europe, which, as far as they’re concerned, is some other place altogether. You’ll hear about Sobieski, Chopin, Mickiewicz, Milosz, Wojtyla, and Walesa, or about how Marie Curie's maiden name was Sklodowska, and that she was born and raised in Warsaw, not far from where you’re standing, facing the skyscrapers and the national stadium going up in the shadow of the spruced-up Palace of Culture and Science, that was gifted to the Polish people by Stalin and company.

But if you wish to see Andrzej Stasiuk’s Poland, where Warsaw’s traffic and designer boutiques end, where you are not following the ancient amber trade route so much as the needle of a compass held by one of Poland’s most engaging writers (whose popularity in the English-speaking world is on the rise), you must, necessarily you must, point your balloon south. You’ll need to see Kraków, the country’s cultural heart. From there, it’s a mere stone’s throw to the small village in the Beskids where Stasiuk lives and writes, having abandoned many modern luxuries in favor of a house in the foothills, herds of sheep, and an occasional horse-drawn carriage. “My Europe is full of animals,” he announces, not unironically, in his book On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe. In this collection of 14 travel essays, Stasiuk travels more or less along the 24th longitude, through Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, and Moldova.

When I was a child growing up in Poland, it was not uncommon to see a horse grazing in the field not far from my family’s apartment building. When we took our summer vacations, we often saw cows trotting along the side of the highway. Those days are over. Nowadays, one is unlikely to see livestock near population centers, even small towns. This separation has, on the one hand, had a tremendous effect on our sanitary standards, but it has also completely robbed us of the understanding of where we get our meat, and of certain other obvious animal roles. But where Stasiuk travels, the sight of children and women in headscarves tending to a herd of cattle is still common. Indeed, the image of “[t]he human joined with ...